Toshiba portable hard drive error 0x80071AC3

I have got a Toshiba protable hard drive from last year or so and it has been working great until now. Today when I connected it to my computer then it asked me to reformat the drive and didnt give me any other options. Since I didnt get any other option so I choose to reformat it but upon doing that I got a message that stated "Hard Drive Error: Volume is dirty 0x80071AC3". I tried the option to automatically fix the file system but nothing worked for me. Does anyone have any resolution for this problem? Thanks.

Try to run the chkdsk utility on your computer and see if that works. To do the same, click on Start and then click on Control Panel. After that go to Administrative tools > Computer Management > Disk Management > right click on the drive and choose properties. Now click on Tools and then check the box for both automatically fix files and scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors. Now restart your computer and it will scan your hard drive after booting. It will take some time and after that once you login to the desktop, check to see if the drive is appearing or not.

Incase if it is taking too much time for scanning through the chkdsk utility then it might be possible that there are too many sectors that have failed and it is trying to fix the same. In any case you can run the Disk Manufacturer's bootup diagnostic and download and burn it to the CD. After using this utility for scanning the bad hard drive, you can report back about the progress.

For this type of problems, the hard drive can be recovered for the error quite comfortably. You will have to check or identify what all sectors have gone bad from the hard drive and then mark them as bad sectors so that Windows doesnt try to use the left over section of the hard drive to scan it and take more time. You will not even lose data when you do the process or chkdsk on the drive.